Game Development is hard work, and like many jobs, sometimes you’ve got to cheat a little bit. In a recent Twitter thread, game Developers have come forward to share their most embarrassing workarounds, some of which are genuinely hilarious.
Prompted by Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor, the developers range from current indie designers to grizzled triple-A veterans, all of whom have stories to share about pulling out the duct tape when nothing else seems to work. In some cases, inexperience with coding or engine use forced developers to come up with bizzare solutions to what seem like simple problems, while in others, shipping deadlines meant coming up with something on the fly, quickly.
Stuff like this exists all over games: In Fallout 3, for instance, you may have heard that the moving presidential metro car you find in Broken Steel is actually a very large hat for an NPC. And there are plenty of ‘field expedient’ fixes that you never see that cover bugs and memory leaks and auto-save problems. Games are complicated, and unraveling a problem you discover toward the end of development might mean blowing a deadline or breaking a bunch of other stuff you’ve done in the meantime.